Methods in Psycholinguistics

Over the past 20 years, linguists have become increasingly interested in testing theories with a wider range of empirical data than the traditionally accepted introspective judgments of hand-selected linguistic examples. Consequently, linguistics has seen a surge of interest in psycholinguistic methods across all subfields. This course will provide an overview of various standard psycholinguistic techniques and measures, including offline judgments (e.g., binary categorization tasks like truth-value judgments, Likert scale ratings, continuous slider ratings), response times, reading times, and eye-tracking. Students will present and discuss research articles, but the bulk of the course is project-based: students will run an experiment (either a replication or an original design, if conducive to the student's research) to gain hands-on experience with experimental design and web-based experimentation; data management, analysis, and visualization in R; and open science tools like git/GitHub and pre-registration.